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The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...
May 2008 - Posts
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Bonnie Goldstein just posted a great " Hot Document "—the police report filed by the mom in Port St. Lucie, Fla., whose 5-year-old son was "voted out" of his kindergarten class by his teacher and classmates because he was disruptive. I was grateful to Read More...
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Ellen , that is one gutsy post, and a public service, too. (Maybe Prudie has some suggestions on ways to get the "Clooney it up a little bit'' message out?) No way the big-screen Sex and the City could match last night's Daily Show spoof , in which Jason Read More...
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Somebody please stop me, but I'm afraid I have more to say on the subject that Tim Noah challenged us to: "What makes married women want to have affairs?" I ran into Meghan in the ladies' room, and we both scoffed at the notion that "You don't hear stories Read More...
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Tim: Last week you challenged us to reveal the reasons women cheat (or want to) in response to our posts about this Philip Weiss article . I'm late to the party. But first I wanted to second Ellen's no-nonsense answer: For the same reasons men do. Desire, Read More...
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About Clinton I have nothing to say. But I do want to give a shout out to my girl, Marjorie and say this: I've got your back! Anyone brave enough to write about the fallout from the gender wars for Newsweek , that magazine of Middle America, is going Read More...
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Not to beat a not-quite-yet dead horse but I agree with Emily and Melinda about Hillary Clinton's assassination comments. Clinton knew exactly what she was saying. That's why she repeated the comments after having already made the same point to Time magazine Read More...
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It's interesting that Ruth and Rachael both used the word evil —as in, what Hillary said about RFK's assassination was unfortunate but not evil . Now, I wouldn't use that particular word to describe Clinton or what she said about Bobby Kennedy, either. Read More...
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Great answers in "The Fray" to Timothy Noah's question about why women cheat: Desire takes many forms . Laura Kipnis’ Against Love answered Tim’s question! It’s about body image . My “open marriage” was really a lousy marriage in disguise . Why I cheat Read More...
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Faulkner was right , and that's what makes HBO's Recount so hard to sit through: It isn't that we know how it's going to end. It's that it hasn't ended, and isn't past, for our asthmatic planet or our military families or our still wholly unreformed electoral Read More...
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Our colleague Ruth Marcus weighs in on the RFK controversy: Ok, I’m feeling the need to weigh in on assasin-gate and disagree with my friends Emily, Rosa and Melinda about how bad Hillary Clinton’s comments were. This is my first blog post, ever, so I Read More...
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So this is what it's come to: the Lone Gunman strategy. It's no secret that Hillary Clinton has been hoping for a colossal misstep by Barack Obama, or a damaging revelation, to end his candidacy, leaving her the last woman standing. But the satisfying Read More...
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XXer Rosa Brooks sends this one in: I think we know exactly what Hillary meant: "Nice nominee you got there ... sure would be a shame if anything happened to him." Awfully big-hearted of her to be willing to stick around through August, just in case .. Read More...
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I'm not saying she literally hopes he dies soon. (Plus, she's apologized, so case closed, right?) But Hillary didn't mean what she said this time just like she wasn't exactly shouting out to hardworking white people, and Bill didn't quite say Jesse equals Read More...
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I admit I watched Sex and the City , the series, pretty religiously. I missed the beginning. And after watching my first episode, I hated it. I hated the way they talked: the faux fabulousness. But it was oddly addictive. It was like a train wreck I couldn't Read More...
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Melinda , I admit this is a new one for me, defending Hillary, but I don't think that's quite what she meant. My take on it (and some of our Slate colleagues seem to concur) is that she was referring to the fact that it's only May, so it's too soon for Read More...
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Sorry to get distracted from sex and HBO for a minute, but just when I thought Hillary Clinton could no longer surprise me, did she really just say hey, he could always get shot? Which raises the question: In the unlikely event of a "dream ticket,'' who Read More...
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Oh gosh. Can I hide in a closet for the next two weeks, until, like a bad skin peel, this movie flakes off and goes away? For the first five or six or 20 seasons that it was on, I avoided the show, out of principal. What principal, I'm not sure—just the Read More...
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I was going to say I watched that show sort of like I used to watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom as a kid. But that's wrong, because on the other side of the earth, there really are wildebeests leaving the herd. Whereas nowhere in nature are there women Read More...
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As every mom and single woman in my corner of the universe knows, Sex and the City opens as a movie next weekend. So, with the critical distance born of many years of reruns, are you lovers or haters? Me, I only really discovered the show last summer, Read More...
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Tim and Ellen , the few married women I know who've come right out and said they were having affairs all wound up divorcing the hubby and marrying the "other man.'' Only, those are just the ones who talked about it. One of my most gorgeous married friends Read More...
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Catherine Price's Broadsheet post about a recent article on honor killings has been haunting me all week, not because the subject is new but because, like her, I can't get past the idea of a father stomping, stabbing and suffocating his 17 year-old daughter Read More...
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All right, Tim Noah , I will bite. "What makes married women want to have affairs?" you ask? The same things that make married men want to have affairs (excepting, of course, the desire to "spread seed"). Monogamy is hard. For all of us. It's unrealistic Read More...
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A guest post (or rather a challenge) from Slate 's Tim Noah: May I put in a good word for Philip Weiss? Before proceeding, let me stipulate that I know Phil and have edited him in the past. It would be a stretch to call him a friend (we've exchanged perhaps Read More...
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Agree entirely, D , that Clinton doesn't get to reduce her loss to sexism. But what's the evidence that she has? She made that one "demeaning to millions of women" comment this week. Bill Clinton apparently mentioned it. (Not sure that counts, since I Read More...
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The ailing Ted Kennedy has said that he would like the successor to his seat be his wife, Vicki. Isn’t this rather richly ironic since Kennedy has done all he can to stop the Clintons from extending their White House dynasty by opposing Hillary’s election Read More...
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Anyone else catch yesterday’s ripped-from-the-headlines Law & Order finale ? About a New York governor who hires expensive young hookers (and some strange, tangentially related murder)? Anyone else notice that the single biggest difference between Read More...
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Emily I don’t think anyone disputes that hideous instances of sexism have been stirred up in this campaign. Nor does anyone dispute that Ms. Clinton is entitled to address it, which she has done very deftly at times. The question is whether she’s entitled Read More...
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I dutifully watch American Idol every week because my daughter is a huge fan. After two seasons, I have learned to (almost) enjoy it. I basically just pretend I'm living in a different age and a pleasant second-string country, maybe in Latin America or Read More...
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Hanna and Dahlia , I'll play defense. I completely agree that the sexism vs. racism face-off is useless and also destructive — I'm with Kim forevermore on that one. But Hillary is right, the response to her candidacy has unleashed sexist and misogynist Read More...
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That's funny, Meghan — when you just posted asking if any of us had seen Philip Weiss' cover piece for this week's New York , I was debating whether it was worth gathering my own thoughts about it. Poor Weiss is already being eaten alive, entertainingly, Read More...
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Has anyone sat down yet with New York 's cover story, a long essay entitled " The Affairs of Men: The Trouble with Sex and Marriage ," pegged to the Eliot Spitzer scandal? Inside, however, is not an outré confession but a fiftysomething baby boomer's Read More...
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Well, I’ll bite Hanna . Of course Hillary Clinton is a victim of sexism. She’s also a victim of classism, regionalism, her own cross-eyed optimism, of massive political miscalculation, and of her association with epic philanderer Bill Clinton. The fact Read More...
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Interesting report, released today by the American Association of University Women, which says that the idea of a boys' crisis in education is so much bull. Being one of those women who struggled in school with math (because it did not interest me, or Read More...
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We have reached the moment of the endless military metaphor—the image of one lone warrior steeling herself against the tsunami of enemy forces—which, as any Hillary watcher knows, marks the beginning of the end. Yesterday, in the front-page New York Times Read More...
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For those who have asked how to help: http://www.endfistula.org/ or http://www.fightfistula.org/programs_partners.asp Read More...
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A story today on TheRoot.com about the devastating effects of fistula in the developing world carried this headline: "What $300 Can Do." The dollar figure referred to the cost of repairing the physical damage that occurs to some women who experience long Read More...
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Bonnie, thanks for your response. These are very complicated and delicate issues, which is why so often we'd all prefer to just sip our lattes and talk about something else. One problem is that we don't even have a common language for discussion. We can't Read More...
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EJ . What a tremendous post. Thank you. And yes, you are right, the decision to treat the same-sex plaintiffs in this case as a suspect class, warranting “strict scrutiny”—the most rigorous and unforgiving type of constitutional review—is a huge big deal Read More...
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About a year ago, I was visiting friends in Los Angeles. They had a small dinner party in my honor. All of us were lesbians, all relatively political. One couple had been together nearly 30 years, since they met in law school; another couple was raising Read More...
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Welcome, Kim, and I’m glad you brought up Alice Walker's “womanist” position. Her Root essay last March, “Lest We Forget: An Open Letter to My Sisters Who Are Brave,” endorsing Barack Obama stayed with me a long time. Not just because I found Walker’s Read More...
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Rachael, I could not agree more. Hillary Clinton is far too smart a cookie (oops, is that sexist?) for me to believe her comments were but a sad, sad slip of the tongue. She knew exactly which signal flag she was waving toward the hills of West Virginia. Read More...
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Emily , Hillary can be called a lot of things, but dumb is not one of them. So I don't buy for a second that she thinks that her comments about white working-class voters was the "dumbest thing she ever said." (Especially considering the other worthy Read More...
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Remember how Hillary said last week that Obama's support was weakening among "working, hardworking Americans, white Americans?" Not smart, some of us at Slate thought . Clinton may not have intended to , but her remark tiptoed up to the line of suggesting Read More...
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Among the questions in this 1930s Marital Rating Scale, mentioned by Andrew Sullivan . Take it, and learn your worth. (Only the first page is available.) Read More...
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It was Zen Hillary who stepped to the podium tonight after her big win in West Virginia, where she spoke in modulated tones about money, death, and a campaign that may seem eternal but is "just an instant in time.'' Alas, a Clinton supporter named Florence Read More...
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Well, if you're not, go to the playground and look around. One of the three married mommies innocently trailing their little tyke is cheating, according to a new " Sex and the American Mom " survey conducted by Cookie magazine and AOL Body and apparently Read More...
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Maybe not in South Carolina, it turns out. You may remember Regina McKnight, who in 2001 was convicted of "homicide by child abuse" for her stillbirth. The state argued that she'd killed her fetus by using cocaine while pregnant. This week, the South Read More...
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Emily asked a good question yesterday about the proper feminist reading of Hillary Clinton’s weird new Bartleby phase — wherein she is all but mathematically eliminated; superdelegates are running screaming for the exits; the office furniture is being Read More...
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Sometimes, the obvious is lost on me. Anne, I enjoyed your post about Cherie Blair's back-atcha memoir. But I wasn't sure what to make of what you wrote about her announcement that her fourth child was conceived at Balmoral Castle because she'd decided Read More...
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A few weeks ago, back when we were talking about those political wives who stand in the background at press conferences and speeches, staring fixedly into space while their husbands confess to infidelity, criminality, stupidity, I suggested—to the scorn Read More...
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... you never know how strong she is until she is in hot water." This quote from Eleanor Roosevelt is Hillary's latest feminist argument for her candidacy. As she continues to campaign and tries to turn being behind into a virtue, she keeps reminding Read More...
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In which sector do women have it worst? According to a new report by economist Sylvia Hewlett and her co-authors, science comes out looking bad as usual, this time in the private sector. Women are 41 percent of entry-level hires in science, technology, Read More...
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